TRANSLATION: A QUESTION OF EXPERIENCE. ON UMBERTO ECO’S TRANSLATION THEORY
I. INTRODUCTION
Translation Is Interpretation
The title given to this essay signals that experience is the central issue in Umberto Eco’s thinking on translation. Experience is the perspective through which he creates his translation theory. I will therefore spend significant parts of this essay discussing how Eco develops a theory on translation based on experience—the experience of being translated and of translating. The theory I present is, however, to be considered a reconstruction out of Eco’s writing on translation since he—for lack of completeness—does not want to consider it a theory himself. I place that theory in the wider perspective of Eco the semiotician, looking for connections with and influences from his semiotic work and theory. In a separate final section I present what we can call Eco’s “proper” semiotic translation theory.
While experience is the dominating perspective through which Eco approaches translation, interpretation is the grounding conception for everything he says. His translation theory relies on a basic assumption that comes from his semiotics, namely, that translation is always interpretation. This in itself is not original: it is common to think about translation as a form of interpretation, but in Eco it has a deeper meaning since his semiotic theory is, all in all, a theory of interpretation. In his semiotic universe translation is a species of the genus interpretation and therefore part of a general system of logic regarding how we relate to the world through continuous processes of semiosis. When it comes to literary translation—which is the kind of translation he primarily develops his discussions around—translation is, in Eco’s words, “the interpretation of two texts in two different languages” that, in turn, depend on the different encyclopedic representations of the two texts’ different cultures.1 Explicating what he intends by interpretation, he refers to Peirce’s semiotics and the idea of inference and abduction, specifying that “interpreting means making a bet on the sense of a text, among other things. This sense that a translator must find—and preserve, or recreate . . . is just the outcome of an interpretative inference that can or cannot be shared by other readers.”2 This means that there is no hidden “real” sense that the translator can find—his or her translation is, rather, the result of an interpretive bet. In the following we will see exactly how Eco means that such a semiotic process takes place when we translate.
While interpretation appears to underlie all of Eco’s work on translation, there is one part where it becomes the central issue of the discussion: the part that clearly separates from all the rest of his writings on translation, where the semiotician’s voice takes over from the author’s and a theoretical discussion on the relation and difference between translation and interpretation is developed at the expense of the one based on experience.3
In Eco’s explicit theoretical writings on translation and interpretation, the preoccupation is not yet that of establishing that translation is interpretation, but, rather, that of distinguishing between the two, so that we do not fall into the temptation of holding that “the entire activity of interpretation is to be thought of as translation” since “the universe of interpretations is vaster than that of translation proper,” and “to say that translation is a form of interpretation does not imply that interpretation is a form of translation.”4 On this topic Eco is very clear: translation comes after interpretation and—as the title of one of the chapters of Dire quasi la stessa cosa reads—“interpreting is not translating.”5
The Importance of Experience
Eco could have taken many different positions and roles on the question of translation, given his many connections to it as a semiotician, as a writer whose texts have been translated into many languages, as a scholar with practical experience in translation, and given the two books he has translated. As a semiotician—since translation is a genuinely semiotic problem—he could have created a “semiotic theory of translation” or a “semiotics of translation.” As a writer he could have analyzed the numerous translations made of his own books, or literary translation in general, since he has worked abundantly on the semiotics of literature on many occasions.6 Finally, he could have outlined a theory based on his experiences in translating other writers’ books. All these areas of Eco’s work are present in his writings on translation; all his different voices are there, but one definitely with more emphasis when compared to the others, namely, the one that privileges experience. The majority of what he has written about translation takes advantage of his personal experience in translating, in being translated, and in the often very close collaboration he has with his translators.
At the opening of Experiences in Translation, the book based on a series of presentations that he gave at the University of Toronto in 1998, Eco states: “It might seem strange that, rather than discuss my experiences in translation from the point of view of theoretical concepts, I deal with theory only after analysing these experiences. But, on the one hand, this decision reflects the way in which I arrived at certain theoretical explanations, and, on the other, I deliberately wanted to discuss my experiences in the light of a ‘naïve’ concept of translation.”7 He arrives at these “theoretical explanations” principally as a translated author: his first novel, Il nome della rosa appeared in 1980, and the first translations of it appeared in French, German, and Spanish in 1982, while the English version, The Name of the Rose, was published in 1983. In the following years the book was translated into numerous languages and became an international best seller. Then the other novels came regularly and the number of translations increased continuously. With them, the number of contacts with translators working in numerous different languages—along with questions, examples, and problems—increased exponentially, putting Eco in a particularly advantageous position for observation of translation phenomena. He became an experienced translated author. His reflections on translation are strongly influenced by what he learns from translators’ work on his own books, and from assisting them and guiding them to find solutions to the problems and questions that arise in the transposition of his texts (novels) into other linguistic, cultural, and literary contexts. Further on in Experiences in Translation he explains why he ascribes experience such importance:
If translation studies are concerned with the process of translation from a source language A in a language Alpha to a target text B in language Beta, then translation scholars should have had, at least once in their life, both the experience of translating and that of being translated (obviously into a language they know, so they can work in close collaboration with their translator). . . . Active or passive experience in translation is not irrelevant for the formulation of theoretical reflections on the subject. In my lectures, therefore, my primary aim is to consider certain problems that I have tried to solve, not as a translation theorist or as a semiotician interested in translation, but as a translated author and as a translator. Naturally, in reconsidering those experiences, I cannot avoid thinking like a semiotician, but this is only a secondary aspect of my lectures.8
From these last words it is clear that Eco bases his reflections on experience not simply because he has a particularly rich personal experience of translation, with many good examples to share, but even more because he is convinced that a theory of translation cannot, or must not, be developed without being grounded in experience. Eco is thus following a philosophical tradition that sees experience as a form of understanding that derives directly from passive or active contact with a practice. Abstract thinking without anchorage in “real” translation is, in Eco’s opinion, less convincing.
Umberto Eco’s Writing on Translation
Compared to many dimensions of his theoretical work, the history of Umberto Eco’s theory of translation is relatively short. While his theoretical publications start to appear at the middle of the 1950s, his first essay on translation is not published until 1992, appearing in the proceedings of a conference that took place in Forlì in Italy a few years earlier.9 That essay initiates a ten-year period of intense publishing activity on translation, which terminates—for now—in 2003, with the publication of two books, one in English and one in Italian: Dire quasi la stessa cosa (Saying almost the same thing) and Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation. Over approximately ten years, Eco’s publications on translation—in both English and Italian—number around ten titles all together, including books and articles.
In this essay I will not go into each publication separately, but, rather, discuss Eco’s contributions thematically. This organization allows for a natural way of presenting his thinking on translation in the most organic and comprehensive fashion. In addition, many themes, discussions, and examples actually appear in more than one publication. In fact many of the publications overlap since many of them are results of conferences or lectures held in either Italian or English.
The Italian book Dire quasi la stessa cosa, published in 2003, might be considered a sort of sum of Eco’s writings on translation, not only because, together with Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation, it is his last publication on the theme hitherto but also because it is the most representative and complete collection of all his thinking and writing on translation. These two books follow the aforementioned Experiences in Translation from 2001 and, taken together, the three books collect practically all the issues regarding translation that Eco has considered. I will primarily refer to Dire quasi la stessa cosa because of its completeness and updatedness, but quotations will be taken from the two books in English wherever their content is parallel to what is discussed in the Italian book.
I will consider Eco’s experience both in being translated and as a translator. The two translations he executed himself represent a very different experience from that of being translated, but are all part of the same theoretical contribution. Eco’s practical experience naturally reflects his theoretical one and vice versa. We are speaking of two translations of two very different books, both interesting from a translational point of view: Raymond Queneau’s Exercises de style (1983) and Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie (1999).10 The latter will be discussed more widely here because it is executed in Eco’s most intense period of reflection on translation and was surely stimulated by exactly these reflections. A final text, which is distinct from Eco’s other theoretical writings on translation, is his introduction to James Joyce’s “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” the famous eighth chapter of Finnegans Wake. Here Eco is neither translator nor author but, instead, the Joyce expert who introduces the Italian and French translations of the book that has been named the most difficult, if not impossible, book to translate. Finally, while I mainly refer to Eco’s publications on translation, I will also contextualize them within his theoretical production in semiotics in general. Special attention will be given to one book in particular, The Limits of Interpretation (1990), since it appears particularly relevant for understanding Eco’s translation theory.11
Basic Theoretical Assumptions and Principles
Before we look more closely at the concrete texts and examples, a few more theoretical premises and clarifications are needed (in addition to experience and interpretation) regarding what kind of translations Eco deals with and how he “constructs” his theoretical accounts.12 His subject matter is translation proper, that is, the translation of a written text in one language into a written text in another language. He also speaks of “other kinds of so-called ‘translation’ . . . or intersemiotic translation or transmutation,” but in those cases distinguishes clearly between what is translation proper and what is not, mainly with the purpose of creating clear limits for what can and cannot be understood as translation.13
The kind of texts Eco treats regarding translation are literary. He mainly analyzes and comments on fiction: his own and others’ novels, but poetry also receives considerable attention.14 Questions regarding the translation of nonliterary (nonfiction) texts are excluded from his concern, which means that his theory can be considered principally as an aesthetics of translation.
In dealing with translation proper, Eco follows the basic criteria of what he calls common sense to circumscribe the questions of translation to those taking place in a publishing house, where they follow the implicit law that consists in “the ethical obligation to respect what the author has written.”15 His discussions of different translation questions often proceed as a construction of binary oppositions between two opposed solutions. In this he follows the long tradition in translation theory initiated by Cicero, who pitted the free versus the literal, operating frequently with either/or options such as, for instance, source versus target, loss versus gain, archaize versus modernize, and “foreignize” versus domesticate. Traditional notions from translation theory like “faithful” and “equivalence” are also frequently used.16 The solution to the different options and difficulties in translation, Eco argues, is negotiation. In fact the statement that translation is in the end a question of negotiation seems to be the conclusion he arrives at in his last two books of 2003.
II. ECO: TRANSLATED
There are authors who are not interested in the translations of their books, often because of linguistic incompetence. . . . Often the disregard is hiding two . . . execrable prejudices: either the author believes he is a genius of unrepeatable characteristics, and accepts the translation as a painful political accident in expectation of the time when the whole of humanity will learn his language in order not to lose any of the pearls of his creativity. Or the author has a racist prejudice and thinks it is not worthwhile to pay attention to the sentiments of the readers of inferior civilisations.17
Eco does not belong to either of these two kinds of authors—he is rather the opposite. He is interested in his translators’ work, shows a deep respect for their commitment and care, and is convinced that the author has both the duty and the right to help translators in solving translation problems of their own books. Being such an internationally well-known author, whose books—especially the novels—have been translated into many languages, puts Eco in an especially advantageous position for observing how different translators, with different languages and cultures, work with the same text. We could in a certain sense say that Eco has created an “observatory” where he monitors his translators’ work and reflects on the different problems and solutions, compares them, and discusses them in both practical and theoretical terms.
Throughout the years Eco has been particularly helpful to his translators in answering questions, giving suggestions, discussing solutions, assisting, and collaborating. Not only does he respond to the questions they pose, he also prepares notes for them with indications, suggestions, and explanations for the words, expressions, and passages that he foresees might cause problems. His experience tells him that many problems are common for many translators and are therefore useful to treat together, and he even anticipates where in his texts the translators may meet with difficulties. He considers not only questions that for some reason (linguistically or culturally) might represent a translation problem, but also ones that have more to do with interpreting and rendering certain expressions or passages that he invites his translators to solve in a certain manner. He writes: “The problem . . . is to make translators aware of allusions that, for many reasons, might escape them. For this reason I usually send my translators pages and pages of notes about my various undetectable quotations—and suggest to them the way in which these quotations can be perceptible in their own language.”18 The translation examples Eco refers to in his texts are mainly taken from the languages he knows: English, German, French, and Spanish. Often a discussion of a certain translation question proceeds through comparisons among the different translation solutions in these four languages. We understand that Eco habitually collaborates closely with those translating his works into these languages, but that he is also able to help and collaborate with those translating into the languages he does not know.
Of course Eco is not the only author who has such a wide experience in being translated into many different languages. It is common for translators to contact authors in order to clarify questions and to get help and/or authorization to find solutions, even if, as we have seen in Eco’s words above, not all authors are willing to undergo such a collaboration. Actually, as far as I know, few authors collaborate so closely with their translators and no one has made it an object of theoretical discussion and publication as Eco has. His writing on his experiences in translation is therefore quite unique.
Before we look at some examples of the translation questions Eco takes up in his writings, let me recall that the experiences he refers to do not always concern translations of his own books. We find a wide range of examples taken from world literature, from Aristotle to Joyce, Dante to Dumas, and Shakespeare to Tolstoy, as well as examples taken from less canonized authors, or from real life. In spite of this presence of cases that do not pertain to Eco directly, I have chosen to concentrate almost exclusively on those taken from his own texts since they represent an important component of the examples and because they stand for the special characteristics of Eco’s “experienced” contribution to translation theory. As noted above, no other author can be compared to him in this operation: no other author—as far as I know—has ever done a systematic comparative work on his own translators’ choices and solutions.19
The examples Eco presents from his experience in translation illustrate much more than the process of collaboration with the translators. They demonstrate what Eco thinks about translation, what duties, freedoms, and responsibilities he assigns the translator, what he means by faithfulness and equivalence, and in what sense he intends that every translation is, in principle, first a matter of interpretation and then of negotiation. This is exactly the way in which he proceeds in his writing: from and through examples, to illustrate and develop theoretical explanations.
Producing the Original’s Effect
The following representative examples used by Eco to explain what he thinks about translation show that the idea that a translation must reproduce the original’s effect returns.20 “The aim of a translation, more than producing a literal ‘equivalence’, is to create the same effect in the mind of the reader (obviously according to the translator’s interpretation) as the original text wanted to create. . . . A good translation must generate the same effect aimed at by the original.”21 Thus, not only is Eco willing to permit his translators to be “unfaithful” to the letter if they can thereby be faithful to the original’s effect, he also makes this valid for translation in general. He sometimes gives translators instructions on what that effect is—as in the following example—in order to help them create an equivalent effect in their language. This happens especially in cases of allusions, double coding, or hidden quotations, which Eco’s novels are full of.
The term “equivalence” is a much debated one and, although there is general agreement that total equivalence is impossible, many scholars continue to use it to maintain the idea that there must be a principle of at least similarity, if not sameness, in a translation’s relation to an original text. To delimit the idea of equivalence, most scholars have created a specific definition. In Eco the term is mainly used regarding effect, maintaining that a translation should be equivalent to the effect created by the original. As we shall see, this principle permits Eco to be rather flexible toward the different solutions that a translator might propose.
Eco writes that the protagonists of his novel Foucault’s Pendulum “frequently indulge in literary quotations and seem incapable of seeing the world except through their literary recollections.”22 In a “description of a drive in the hills,” the beautiful landscape gives the “impression of boundless horizons al di là della siepe.”23 Eco explains that every Italian reader would recognize this expression (which literally means beyond the hedge) as the hedge mentioned by the famous poet Giacomo Leopardi in his L’infinito. Thus he instructs his translators on what in this passage he wants them to render. “I told my various translators that neither the hedge nor the allusion to Leopardi were important but insisted that the literary clue should be kept at all costs. I told them that the presence of a castle or a tree instead of a hedge made no difference to me, provided that the castle and the tree evoked a famous passage in their own national literature, in the context of the description of a magical landscape.”24
Elsewhere, regarding the special baroque style he remade in the novel The Island of the Day Before, he explains: “I urged my translators not to translate literally but to look for equivalents in their respective literatures of the seventeenth century whenever possible.”25 Along the same lines of valorizing the re-creation of an effect rather than an exact expression or word, there is the example of the Russian solution to the frequent quotations and book titles in Latin in The Name of the Rose. Eco and his translator agreed on rendering his frequent Latin quotations “in the old ecclesiastic Slavonic used by the Orthodox Church in the Middle Ages” since “Russians do not associate Latin with religion, monks, monasteries, and so on,” as Western readers do.26 Here again we see that it is the effect that matters. What is not explicit is how translators can be sure they are capturing the effect aimed at by the original when there is no author to explain.
Proceeding from these few examples illustrating the kind of collaboration Eco has with his translators, we ought to consider something further that should help us reconstruct the kind of translation theory Eco is building. On the one hand, there is a faith in the subjective ability of the translator, with the assistance of the author, to solve enigmas and difficulties and to derive a text that is “almost the same” as the original or that obtains the “same effect.” On the other hand, there is an implicit idea that the translations expected and accepted by publishing houses always follow a standard and universal idea of what it means to “respect what the author has written,” as we saw in the quotation from Mouse or Rat?27 The two figures in isolation, translator and author alone, seem to represent the universe of translation, free to cope with eventual expectations, norms, and pressures from the social, cultural, and linguistic context. Eco’s perspective appears in this sense as rather traditional compared to scholars today who tend to look at translation as a process very much conditioned by the specific social, historical, and cultural context in which the translation takes place. According to them, the translators’ interpretations and the translations are neither independent nor neutral but are, instead, dependent on the dominant cultural context in which they are working, where publishing houses might be seen as the institutions that represent constraints that go far beyond those we mentioned above. Moreover, every context is somehow partial since it is shaped by ideological instances, unequal power relations, and agency considerations that—either explicitly or implicitly—orient the translator’s decisions.28
Common Sense
In deciding what is and what is not a translation Eco chooses to follow the normal, common-sense practice followed in the publishing houses. “The everyday activity in a publishing house tells us that, at least in cases of blatant misunderstanding, it is easy to establish that a translation is wrong and deserves severe editing. Maybe it is only a question of common sense, but common sense must be respected.”29 To explain, for instance, what he means concerning the extent to which translators can change the story they are translating, Eco says that “it is clear that every single text allows for a different and individual solution.” Furthermore: “Common sense suggests that in The Island of the Day Before translators can change ‘Roberto saw a striped polyp’ into ‘Roberto saw an ocellated polyp,’ but they certainly are not permitted to change the global macro-proposition ‘Roberto is shipwrecked on an abandoned vessel just off an island that lies beyond the 180th meridian.’”30
“Common sense” acquires an important position in Eco’s reasoning on translation since common sense “is not necessarily a bad word,” but is, rather, a phenomenon that has been taken very seriously in many philosophies. Commonsensical logic should guide us, according to Eco, when translation choices and decisions are to be made. Proceeding according to common sense also leads him to propose rather pragmatic solutions and to offer answers regarding how a translation should relate to its original. These pragmatic solutions, as we have seen, consist often in what he calls “compensation”: through rewriting, the translator recreates the effect of the original. But Eco also asks how rewriting can be considered translation, recognizing that he is moving on the borders of the notion of translation. If translation proper is the kind of text he has decided to treat, it does not mean that the effect of a translation proper cannot be reached through rewriting. The exact definition of these borders between what is and is not translation is the issue in his discussion of intersemiotic translation, where, as we shall see, the commonsensical principle continues to be followed.
Umberto Eco Collaborates with his Translators. An Authorizing Voice?
According to Eco, compensation, rewriting, and negotiation are all operations that in the end should guarantee a faithful translation, a translation that says “almost the same thing”—as his book of 2003 is titled: Dire quasi la stessa cosa. In other words, he gives maximum freedom to the translators if they stay inside certain parameters defined by the author. Eco is interested in their faithfulness, not to his words, but to the effects of equivalence that he has created with those words.
Presenting the different solutions found by the translators, Eco shows how a translator can recreate a similar effect in a different linguistic, cultural, and intertextual universe. One suspects that such freedom is possible only because the author himself authorizes it. Is it so clear that a commonsensical rule or convention would permit translators these freedoms if it had not been for the author’s authorization? Perhaps a publishing house would have difficulties allowing such freedom according to commonsensical rules of ethics. And how do we integrate this kind of authorial voice in a perspective such as Eco’s, who has always been arguing that it is not the author’s intention to be interpreted but that of the text—intentio operis? Eco is of course aware of the possibility of such an objection and promptly responds that what he is really defending is the intention of the text, simply helping the translators to recreate it in their own language. “Translators must aim at rendering, not necessarily the intention of the author (who may have been dead for millennia), but the intention of the text—the intention of the text being the outcome of an interpretative effort on the part of the reader, the critic, the translator.”31
In an earlier publication Eco discusses this issue himself, asking: “Is it right that the author collaborate to afford an interpretation of his own work, or at least to offer the reader a possibility of interpreting?”32 His affirmative answer explains that it should be an author’s right and duty to interfere in the re-creation of a text’s “moves in a game” in order to guarantee the same options of free interpretation that the original text presented. It is an author’s desire, he explains, that the reader is free to interpret his text, but it must be an interpretation of that text and not of another. On a practical level I am sure that Eco’s generous availability towards the translators is extremely helpful and welcomed by them, and I am convinced that the translations of his novels in this way avoids all those misunderstandings and slips that inevitably sneak into translations. But is it always the case that the author is the person best suited to recommend translation solutions of his or her own texts in other languages? And what do translators do when they do not have such an authority to assist them? Even if Eco does not abuse the power he has to censure or orient his translators, and even if he always appears as a particularly liberal and open-minded author with regard to their choices and preferences, his double (or triple) role of author and critic (and translator) of his own texts might be questionable. An empirical author who assesses what the intentio auctoris wants the intentio operis to be might actually represent a problem, at least in principle.
Actually we are touching on a very delicate question here, one that is closely intertwined with Eco’s semiotics and especially with his theory of interpretation (of literary texts). It is a question of the limits of interpretation and of the difference between interpretation and use that is widely discussed in his semiotic writings (which I return to later). I limit the discussion here to a question of what this means in strict connection to the collaboration between author and translator.
The many interesting examples taken from the translations of Eco’s own novels and the fascinating comparisons between the solutions in the different languages certainly make for interesting reading. It is exciting to read about how the translator and Eco can come up with surprising solutions to complicated translation problems, and admirable how open Eco is to alternative options that might end up far from the original. Moreover, it is interesting to read about solutions that, according to the author, are even better than the original. Translation does not always involve loss, it also permits gain. But what do these examples say about translation in general? Is it possible to make generalizations in these cases and develop a general translation theory? Today’s translation studies are making strong efforts to free the field from the image of translating as something limited to the translator’s interpretation and the consequent negotiations that reproduce and recreate the original’s effect. Translation does not take place in a void, they say, where the only question is that of getting the translator to recreate the “same effect.”
III. ECO: TRANSLATOR
The second aspect of the translation theory developed by Eco through experience is that of his own translating of Exercises de style by Raymond Queneau (in 1983) and Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval (in 1999). Of Queneau’s text we could say that Eco translates its rhetorical exercise rather than its words. Actually, since the text experiments with all sorts of things that are included in ars rhetorica, we could say, in Eco’s terminology, that its effect is that of creating comical effects through rhetorical figures and that Eco translates that effect. In his introduction to the translation he speaks of what it meant to be faithful to a book of this kind, and that it was clear that it did not mean to be literal. Faithfulness, in Eco’s opinion, meant to understand the rules of the game, to respect those rules, and then to play a new game with the same number of moves. Rewriting is therefore an appropriate definition of Eco’s kind of work, or the recreation of the rhetorical exercises without necessarily concentrating on the importance of reproducing single terms or expressions. He explains:
Queneau’s Exercises can, at least to a certain degree, be translated because none of them is purely linguistic and they are all bound up with intertextuality and historical circumstance—nor can any be entirely detached from the particular language, the spirit of French, in which they were originally written. In both respects, it is not so much a question of translating as of recreating in another language within a different social and historical and intertextual context, which is the approach . . . [I] have followed.33
Since it is a text’s intentio to which one must be faithful, not necessarily its literal sense, we find that Eco is liberal and open minded both when he is being translated and when he translates.34
Eco’s translation of Sylvie, the result of many years of the study of and fascination with the novel, is discussed and analyzed in several seminars and publications, and was carried out during the years of his most intense attention to the question of translation. This translation is an example of how the practice of translation might be the most attentive reading of a text, and how such an attentive reading necessarily presents a certain critical interpretation of that text. The translation of Sylvie is followed by a detailed presentation and discussion regarding problems of the interpretation-translation of the novel. The theoretical discussion of what Eco understands to be the specificity of Nerval’s text, namely, what he calls effetto-nebbia (the fog effect), and of how this effect is produced, is a result of his literary interpretation of the text. The fog effect consists in a dreamy feeling of vagueness, where it is difficult to establish exactly when things in the story take place. Eco demonstrates how the different allusions to time create this fog effect since the reader is never able to establish exactly which time the narrator is referring to. Even more importantly, the effect is created by the insistent use of the imperfect tense of the verbs, which in French, as well as in Italian, is the tense of the durative and iterative aspects, the vaporous, and, yes, the foggy.
Consistent with Eco’s conviction that this special effect is the most interesting character of Nerval’s short novel, and that it is this effect that makes the story so fascinating, the translation strategy adopted is very much concentrated on reproducing exactly this effect by using the imperfect tense of the verbs whenever they appear in the original. Such a strategy thus confirms his principle that a translation should reproduce the original’s effect. This is, however, what Eco interprets as the original’s effect. He seems implicitly to assume that his interpretation is the correct one, not including in his discussion that a particular interpretation-translation of a text necessarily highlights certain aspects of it, with the inevitable effect of putting others in the shadows. Eco’s insistence on recreating what he sees as the central intentio in Sylvie entails—as does all translating—taking a position towards the text, making choices, including and excluding. In this sense, all translations are partial, if not partisan,35 but that does not seem to be part of his considerations.
Eco’s translation of Sylvie comes after more than ten other Italian translations of the same text dating from 1917 to 1983. In addition to his particular affection for this text, a reason for adding another translation to the already copious list of versions is of course because he thinks that something can be done better, something is missing in the previous ones. All retranslations have this ambition, to improve, to update, and to give new life to or throw new light on prior interpretation-translations. But the translator, in this case Eco, needs to be honest and recognize that while his translation is certainly an attempt to improve what the translators did before him, it is at the same time a new version that cannot be compared to the others since it is a result of a different (partial) interpretation. The other translators had other ambitions since their (partial) critical interpretations were different from Eco’s.
The Effect of Single Terms
When we considered Eco’s translation experiences with regard to his own novels, they mainly concerned particular effects produced by a certain style, linguistic register, or allusions and quotations. To reproduce the original’s effect also seems to be his main concern regarding Queneau’s Exercises de style. When it comes to Sylvie, we discover another aspect, namely, how much Eco is focusing on the translation of single terms, striving to find the best-suited term for things and objects. How does one translate the French term chaumière, which does not exist in Italian? Or the frequently used word bouquet that is not the same thing as the Italian mazzo? And what about the detailed description of a skirt, grande robe en taffetas flambé, where it is difficult to understand what is meant by flambé? Or a pair of pink stockings described as des bas de soie rose tender à coins verts, where the interpretation of coins creates serious difficulties? Eco goes on for pages assessing different solutions and historical and etymological explanations, concluding that “I always avoided a literal translation and, without losing the rhythm by describing these objects in too much detail, used an adjective to suggest their appearance.”36
Other cases of single terms refer to less noble texts and contexts, as for instance the difficulty of deciding how to translate downtown and uptown when “the sense of the expressions changes according to the city concerned.” Again, translators should “negotiate the translation according to the city” but, Eco pragmatically adds, “these decisions require vast extra-linguistic knowledge, and translators of detective novels are poorly paid.” So he suggests that one should use the terms in English “to give the tale an exotic connotation.”37 Apropos this last example, even though Eco mainly refers to examples found in high quality fiction, in general he does not disdain discussing more common language situations when he finds that they might illustrate an interesting translation conception.
The particular attention given to single terms may seem somewhat obsolete when compared to current translation studies. We all know that any translator of any text—even the most simple and plain—is continuously confronted with words that do not have any correspondence in another language. But, as Eco’s common sense would suggest, we have to negotiate in order to find the less objectionable solution, looking at context, time, and so forth. The reason why translation studies is not so much concerned about single terms is that there is a general agreement that the real translation problem is not exactly located in single words, even given awareness of the difficulties they might represent. There has been a progressive movement away from the word’s microlevel towards macrolevels that put emphasis on text, context, and culture.38
Finally, two words on Eco’s introduction to Joyce’s “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” from an Italian edition that includes the translation of the same text into both French and Italian, with the important characteristic that Joyce himself participated actively in the execution of both translations. Again, as a parallel to the situation considered above, where Eco himself is being translated—although with different connotations—here we have translations where the author himself is directly involved in the execution of the translations. The Italian version of this particular text represents a “typical case of radical rewriting,” according to Eco, in that “it pushes the limits of the original creation.” Joyce’s rewriting of his own text “shows . . . to what extent the principle of equal reference can be violated for the sake of a deeply equivalent translation.”39 This represents another example of Eco’s high tolerance when he considers that there is equivalence on a deep level of the texts.
IV. UMBERTO ECO’S TRANSLATION THEORY
A Short History
Eco’s writing on translation is rather recent. As I said in the introduction, reflections on translation were totally absent during the 1980s and his major contributions were published in the 1990s and the first years of the 2000s. Placing Eco’s writing in the chronology of his scholarly production is important since his approach to translation, it seems to me, is very much influenced by and consistent with the themes he was most concerned about during the period in which he outlined his theory of translation. Even if his three books on translation—the one in Italian and the two in English—were published at the beginning of the 2000s, they can be seen as results of thinking and reflection that were mainly developed during the 1990s. As we have seen, this thinking was mainly stimulated by his own experiences in translation. The other factor that primarily influences what I have called, here, his semiotic theory of translation is motivated by the seminars on intersemiotic translation held at the University of Bologna in the early 1990s.40 The chronology is significant here since the coincidence between Eco’s personal experiences and research and the attention he starts to give to translation seems to be more than accidental: the one strongly influences the other. This means that Eco’s thinking on translation seems to take a certain direction because he starts to reflect on it during the period in which his most important theoretical contributions in semiotics are published in The Limits of Interpretation, which appeared in Italian and English in 1990 (with only slight differences in content). His thoughts on translation are both implicitly and explicitly intertwined with the themes of his semiotic thinking of that period, such as his theory of interpretation in connection with a semiotics of texts.
While Eco appears particularly preoccupied with what he sees as the risk of a theoretical anarchy that permits all kinds of translations and that forbids any limit to principles and criteria for separating a good translation from a bad one (“some philosophers or linguists have said that there are no rules for deciding whether one translation is better than another one”),41 he seems to be close to the preoccupations he had expressed in The Limits of Interpretation (1990). Another of Eco’s books of these same years, The Search for the Perfect Language (1993), is particularly close to translation. The very answer to the illusion of and search for a perfect universal language—the long history of endeavors to find a solution to the scandal of Babel—is actually translation, Eco concludes.
Part of this history is of course that of translation studies, the discipline that registered an almost explosive expansion in exactly the same years, becoming a growing academic field that compelled publications, conferences, courses, and an increased interest internationally, although with a certain delay in Italy compared to the other Western countries. As declared above, Eco followed—from a distance—the ideas and activity circulating on translation. His concern for the necessity of establishing some limits and criteria for how we define and evaluate translation must also be related to what he registers as prevailing tendencies in translation studies, namely, the nonnormative, target-oriented, descriptive perspective of certain scholars in the 1990s.42
The Limits of Interpretation—The Limits of Translation
The first element in The Limits of Interpretation that has consequences for a theory of translation is present already in the Introduction, where Eco states that “within the boundaries of a given language, there is a literal meaning of lexical items and . . . it is the one listed first by dictionaries as well as the one that Everyman would first define when requested to say what a given word means. . . . Any act of freedom on the part of the reader can come after, not before, the acceptance of that constraint.”43 What Eco asserts here is that there is something like a literal sense of expressions and words and that we always have to refer to that sense before we develop any kind of interpretation. Indirectly, he also says that it is possible to catch a literal meaning in any expression. Although aware of the questionability of this assertion in relation to other theories, and even in apparent contradiction to his own theories of the “open” book presented years before, it now seems that Eco’s reasoning on interpretation needs a fixed point of reference from which every interpretation has to start. His answer to this apparent contradiction is that he was always—even when he called upon a “free” interpretation in The Open Work (Opera aperta 1962)—insisting on a dialectics between fidelity and freedom, on an unstable balance between the reader’s initiative and fidelity to the book.
The coherence between what he said in The Open Work and what he said in The Limits of Interpretation lies in the fact, he seems to claim, that he has always been engaged with the question of fidelity towards a text. And, he adds, during the last thirty years “the rights of the interpreters have been overstated.”44 A more or less explicit polemic against deconstruction is clearly present here and is expressed through the need to (re)establish order and limits in the deviation of the interpretants: “I feel sympathetic with the project of open readings, but I also feel the fundamental duty of protecting them in order to open them, since I consider it risky to open a text before having duly protected it.”45 Eco admits that this principle might sound both conservative and banal, but is not willing to refrain from it at any cost since it is the basis for how he intends interpretation, the role of the interpreter, and consequently semiosis.
To develop his conception of the limits of interpretation Eco resumes the distinction he proposed in The Role of the Reader (1979) between interpretation and use of a text. While an interpretation is sustained by the intentio operis, the coherence of the different conjectures about the text, the use, is not sustainable since it is not concerned with being confirmed by the inner coherence produced by the text’s own intention. A text always imposes limits on the interpreters: if these limits—signalled by the intentio—are not followed, one risks using the text. However, the coherence that Eco is claiming is not that evident and has been debated among scholars like Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brooke-Rose since the publication of The Limits of Interpretation.46 This debate has nothing to do with translation directly but it should be clear that these standpoints cannot vary much if referred to translation: “the fidelity towards texts” is Eco’s principal concern in both instances. I therefore see the above positions as explicating and confirming his positions regarding translation: if there is a literal meaning to catch in all expressions, and if all readings can be classified as either interpretation or use of a text, this means that Eco finds it possible to establish a text’s intentio and consequently to interpret the text (rather than use it) and thereafter to translate.
Although they were not developed primarily in The Limits of Interpretation, the concepts of encyclopedia and model reader are to be included among those particularly relevant for Eco’s translation theory. “Encyclopedia” is particularly important to include in any consideration of a text. In Eco’s semiotic system it presupposes not only linguistic knowledge but also encyclopedic knowledge, which refers to a complex system of shared knowledge expressed through cultural conventions and previous interpretations. Through the concept of encyclopedia texts are perceived as products of a given historical moment in a given cultural milieu; therefore “translation does not only concern words and language in general but also the world, or at least the possible world described by a given text.”47
Experience as Theory
If experience is the dominating perspective through which Eco examines translation, let us now look at what sort of theory comes out of such a process. We certainly have to deal with a pragmatics of translation, based on the idea that the practical experience is able—and maybe even better suited than other approaches—to explain the problems of translation. Through concrete examples, translation problems are contextualized, thereby demonstrating that each problem has to be solved by taking into consideration the pragmatic situation in which it appears.
This pragmatic approach has wider consequences, too: it is as if all of what is said on translation is based on the assumption that translation is a pragmatic question to which one answers by selecting between different possible options, negotiating between gain and loss. One could always consider translation as impossible, since linguistic systems are reciprocally incommensurable, but Eco’s pragmatic answer is that they are nevertheless comparable: even if translation seems to be impossible, we do continue to translate—it’s just a matter of negotiation.
Eco’s position on translation theory is both explicitly and implicitly a polemical one. It is as if much of his writing is inspired by the conviction that translation scholars in general have overlooked many pragmatic concerns in their theorization and that he is therefore forced to present an alternative. As we have seen, he insists on practice, experience, and examples since he is convinced that this focus is lacking among translation scholars in general. He insists on the necessity that common sense must be respected since “some philosophers or linguists have said that there are no rules for deciding whether one translation is better than another one.”48 Examples taken from the practice of publishing houses show that such rules do exist and, Eco seems to say, it is from them that we need to create a theory.
Again, without naming any particular scholar, Eco seems to create his own theory against what he sees as a wrong approach: “so many translation theories stress the principle according to which, in the translating process, the impact a translation has upon its own cultural milieu is more important than an impossible equivalence with the original.”49 This critique is without doubt addressed to the so-called target-oriented scholars who, during the 1980s and 1990s, focused on the impact of translations on the receiving cultures. Their approach is not dominant today, however, and Eco’s evaluation thus appears a bit dated; a dialogue with today’s theories would have appeared very different.
When Eco repeatedly underlines that translations should be faithful to the original by reproducing its effect, recreating the intention of that text, he establishes a kind of holy principle that should always rule, arguing at the same time that there always is such a thing as the intention of a text to identify and to interpret-translate. Again, it is as if he is arguing against a kind of school that promotes free translations with no attention to the original. It is correct that a shift took place in translation studies, away from prescriptive models and toward descriptive studies, and it is right that certain scholars wanted more attention paid to the target text and the receiving context, but this does not mean that they have said that the translator and the receiving culture in general are free to do what they want with an original text, that there are no rules, or that everything is acceptable.
Negotiation
As anticipated above, if seen in a chronological perspective, negotiation is a notion that emerges later in Eco’s writings and becomes an answer to the question of translation in the last two books of 2003. Negotiation appears as a kind of conclusion, or solution, to his discussions on translating, again in complete accordance with the principle of common sense:
Between the purely theoretical argument that, since languages are differently structured, translation is impossible, and the commonsensical acknowledgement that people, in this world, after all, do translate and understand each other, it seems to me that the idea of translation as a process of negotiation (between author and text, between author and readers, as well as between the structure of two languages and the encyclopaedias of two cultures) is the only one that matches our experience.50
The dilemma, which consists in the fact that the wish to save something implies that we lose something else, seems to have negotiation as its logical solution. And the reason why it is all a question of negotiation in the end is based on the fact that, according to Eco, “it is impossible to save all” the relevant textual levels.51
When Eco affirms that negotiation is “a process by virtue of which, in order to get something, each party renounces something else, and at the end everybody feels satisfied since one cannot have everything,” the implicit assumption that a text’s meaning is identifiable is clearly present here as well.52 Eco’s translation strategy, and consequent theory, is therefore reduced to comparison and choice between alternative options where the less objectionable one is always the best solution. In this way a text is presented as an entity in respect of which the translator’s duty is first that of identifying its intention, and then negotiating a result that is a compromise between that identifiable intention and the possibilities of the receiving language in its literary context and historical moment.
That translation is governed by a dialectic, and that every translator has to make choices, is not up for discussion—but the question remains how to explain those choices. An alternative perspective, present in today’s translation studies, tends to look at the translators as less autonomous and neutral in their evaluations of pro et contra, assuming rather that their choices are conditioned and determined by both conscious and unconscious subjectivity, by engagement and bindings, by deliberate or accidental agendas in the representation of the text.
V. UMBERTO ECO’S SEMIOTICS OF TRANSLATION
In this section I propose a reconstruction of Eco’s semiotic theory of translation, mainly through the presentation of the second part of his work dedicated to translation and interpretation, in which his main preoccupation is that of defining and delimiting translation proper in opposition to rewording, adaptation, and intersemiotic transfer.
That translation is interpretation, but not vice versa, is the kind of principle that Eco repeats here, against Roman Jakobson’s famous tripartite definition of translation, with its intralinguistic, interlinguistic, and intersemiotic aspects (1959);53 and against many of his students and colleagues that have erroneously, in his opinion, taken Peirce’s metaphor on interpretation as translation literally. The problem, according to Eco, is that Jakobson, inspired by Peirce, uses the word interpretation to define translation, but in an ambiguous way that has led to confusion and, according to Eco, erroneous interpretations of Peirce’s notion of interpretation, “which is too large to be reduced to the one of translation.”54 Instead of reading Jakobson’s classification in the way that Eco argues is correct, in the sense that “translation is a species of the genus interpretation,” many have instead “decided that [Jakobson] was suggesting that rewording, translation proper and transmutation were three types of translation.”55 Eco fears in this that it is dangerous to identify “the totality of semiosis with a continuous process of translation—in other words, to assert that every interpretation is a form of translation.”56
Eco responds to Jakobson’s classification with an alternative one, where he distinguishes between different forms of interpretation.57 He chooses to create a categorization based on interpretation rather than translation since the latter cannot really be put into fixed classes, its nature being variable in each text and therefore better conceived along a continuum. In Eco’s classification based on interpretation, we find three main types: the first one, interpretation by transcription, is excluded from Eco’s explanations since it proceeds through mechanical codifications. The second category, intrasystemic interpretation, is comprised of three different types. Two of them correspond to Jakobson’s categories, namely intralinguistic and intrasemiotic (interlingustic interpretation in Jakobson’s terminology), while the last one is execution. The third kind of interpretation, intersystemic, is significant in that Eco is basing his classification on the criteria of the presence/absence of one or more semiotic systems. The eventual level of variation in the substance and the matter, or continuum (in Hjelmslevian terms), in the semiotic system decides whether and when we have to do with translation, rewording, or adaptation. According to Eco, the only forms of interpretation that can be called translations are those occurring intersystemically, with only marked variation in the substance. Excluded from the realm of translation, on the other hand, are the intersystemic interpretations that occur with mutation of the continuum or matter. This means that he excludes from translation the transpositions across different semiotic systems when the continuum or matter is different, as, for instance, in cases of the adaptation of a novel into a film, or a visual or musical representation of a poem.
Without going into the details of Eco’s argumentation with regard to the different categories of interpretation, let us consider the aspect that is most important for a semiotics of translation and consequently for a translation theory in general, namely the very definition of the relation between the different semiotic systems: are they reciprocally translatable or not? “Differences in continuum or matter are fundamental in a semiotic theory,” Eco states, and it is on this kind of difference that he stakes the separation between what is translation and what is not.58
While many of his colleagues hold that the very nature of semiotics permits us to consider various interpretive transpositions as translations, beyond and despite the differences among semiotic systems, or in continuum or matter, for Eco it is very important to distinguish between different forms of interpretation, thereby limiting the range of translation. In opposition to hermeneutical philosophers such as, for instance, Heidegger and Gadamer, as well as Eco’s various semiotician colleagues who claim the identity between translation and interpretation, he considers “the differences in degrees of intensity” between translation and interpretation as fundamental.59
Where other semioticians are inclined to consider as translation an interpretation that isolates and recreates certain levels of the source text, beyond and despite eventual variations of substance or continuum, Eco decides a priori that only cases of translation proper can be considered as such. While Paolo Fabbri, for instance, argues for a “polisensorial” conception of translation not bound to a single or a specific semiotic system,60 thereby proposing to move away from the limits of the continuum or matter, to the question of forms of discourse, Eco insists on the criteria of clear distinctions based on the differences in the semiotic systems involved. Where Nicola Dusi maintains that all translation-interpretations consist in different degrees of local translational relations, levels of coherence between the forms of both content and expression,61 Eco states that these differences represent the criteria of separation and distinction between, not degrees of the same thing, but different things.
According to Eco’s classification, it is never possible to consider an adaptation of a novel into a film as a translation. It can be as “faithful” and “equivalent” or as similar as it wants, but by the fact that we have considerable mutation of the continuum or matter, it will always be precluded from being a translation.
Adaptation Is Not Translation
Eco gives many examples to illustrate why adaptations cannot be translations because they either “say too much” or “too little.”62 To illustrate what he means by this, let us go back to one of his personal experiences, that of the film adaptation of his novel The Name of the Rose: in representing the Middle Ages visually, illuminated only by torches, lanterns, and the light from a single window, the effect is “Caravaggesque.” “Perhaps the medieval period portrayed itself in clear and glaring colours, but, in fact, it saw itself for the greater part of the day in Baroque chiaroscuro.”63 Eco is not criticizing the director’s choices—he recognizes that “the film was obliged to make decisions where the novel did not”64—but it is exactly this fact, that a film makes visible aspects that are never mentioned in a novel, and at other times does not manage to “tell” what a novel tells, that makes it impossible, according to Eco, to speak of translation. An adaptation inevitably explicates the unsaid and cannot therefore be considered as translation, he says.
Adaptation always constitutes a critical standpoint, even if an unconscious one, even if due to lack of skill rather than a deliberate choice. Naturally, a translation proper also implies, with an interpretation, a critical standpoint. . . . But in translation the critical attitude of the translator is in fact implicit, and tends to conceal, while in adaptation it becomes preponderant and constitutes the very essence of the process of transmutation.65
In Eco’s a priori definition and separation of translation (proper) and adaptation, above, he sees a fundamental difference in their respective critical attitudes. While he admits, on the one hand, that all transpositions—whether they are translations or adaptations—express a “critical standpoint” on the original, on the other hand, he says that one is concealed and the other explicit, representing “the very essence of the process.” The problem between the different theoretical positions is exactly here: where Eco sees a fundamental difference in the critical attitude that permits him to separate a priori two kinds of transpositions, many of his colleagues do not operate with such a criterion of distinction and classification. All transpositions, whatever be their transference/transformation of the substance, are interpretations, and all transformative interpretations necessarily take a critical standpoint that cannot but consist in selecting, preferring, evidencing, and occulting. This certainly does not mean that all these operations are translations in the same way, but the differences between them are rather gradual and are to be identified a posteriori. In each individual case the distinction between two different transpositions does not necessarily stand out in their level of transmutation of substances, but, rather, in how they locally create levels of translative relations with the original text.
Compared to many of his semiotician colleagues, Eco appears anchored to quite fixed ideas about where translation may occur since he ascribes a crucial and definitive role to the variations and mutations in substance and continuum. The very idea of intersemiotic translation that appeared to many as the great possible contribution of semiotics to translation theory, and a subsequent positive evolution of that theory, seems, according to Eco, never to have materialized in a way. Lotman’s idea of the different semiotic systems as “open” and therefore potentially translatable, and the idea we find in structural semiotics, delineated by Greimas and Courtés, that translatability is one of the deep characteristics of every semiotic system, seem to be excluded a priori from Eco’s considerations.66 But the reason for this is also to be found in the fact that Eco’s main concern here is to define translation itself, while the authors mentioned above are concerned with defining and describing semiotics.
Compared not only to colleagues in his own field but also to scholars in translation studies, whose main attention is devoted to translation proper, Eco’s positions might seem (too) restrictive and limiting. As we have seen above, they also recognize that all translations inevitably take a critical standpoint on the source text and that translation in all cases is partial. Translation is always “metonymic” in that not all of the source text is transposed and only segments or parts of it are highlighted or dominating.67
VI. CONCLUSION
On the basis of this general overview of Eco’s different works on translation, it appears to me that there is a certain contradiction between his theory and practice. Comparing his principles on what translation is and how it should be executed, and the concrete examples he refers to, there seems to be a sort of incongruity: on a theoretical level he seems to be very concerned about the necessity to establish general reference points that should hold always, especially with regard to a definition of what is translation and what is not, while at a concrete, pragmatic level—evidenced by his numerous examples—he seems to be open to a wide range of possible solutions: “only by being literally unfaithful can a translator succeed in being truly faithful to the source text.”68 This contradiction is confirmed by the classification of different forms of interpretation that we have considered in the last section: very few and limited forms of interpretation can be defined as translations. While rewritings and adaptations in concrete situations may be considered as the best solutions to interpret and translate a text’s intentio, the classification does not permit such flexibility. On many occasions one has the feeling that many quite progressive ideas underlie Eco’s written statements, and they are censured when it comes to classifications and definitions.
At this point the contradiction between two positions seems to depend on two incongruous purposes: on the one hand, concrete examples cannot be reduced to classifications formed a priori; on the other hand, classifications can never represent concrete cases that are always different. It is as if each text requires its own classification: whereas Eco’s rewriting of Queneau’s Exercises de style is translation, since the intentio operis requires that kind of interpretation-translation, a similar rewriting of Nerval’s Sylvie would not be called a translation. Where do we position these variable identities of translation in Eco’s narrow classification?
SIRI NERGAARD
UNIVERSITY OF FLORENCE
JANUARY 2016
NOTES
1. Umberto Eco, Experiences in Translation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 14.
2. Ibid., 16.
3. Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), ch. 6, “From Rewording to Translating Substance,” 123–45.
4. Ibid., 72, 123.
5. Umberto Eco, Dire quasi la stessa cosa: Esperienze di traduzione (Milan: Bompiani, 2003).
6. Notably in Lector in fabula: La cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi (Milan: Bompiani, 1979), which is partly translated as The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), and On Literature, trans. Martin McLaughlin (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004).
7. Eco, Experiences in Translation, IX.
8. Ibid., 5–6.
9. “Due pensieri sulla traduzione,” Atti della Fiera Internazionale della traduzione, Riccione, December 10‒12, 1990 (Forlì: Editrice Ateneo, 1992), 10–13.
10. Raymond Queneau, Exercises de style (Paris: Gallimard, 1947); Queneau, Esercizi di stile, trans. Umberto Eco (Turin: Einaudi, 1983). Gérard de Nerval, Sylvie (Paris: Giraud, 1854); Nerval, Sylvie, trans. Umberto Eco (Turin: Einaudi, 1999).
11. Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
12. In this brief presentation I do not include the basic assumptions of Eco’s semiotics on which these more specific concepts related to translation are based, such as, for instance, his definition of interpretation based on and developed from Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics or the principle of incommensurability and comparability grounded on Hjelmslev’s matter or continuum, which considers that each language organizes and segments the content continuum in a different way. Eco includes several of these fundamental conceptions of his semiotic theory in his writings on translation but due to lack of space I will not go into them here.
13. Eco, Mouse or Rat? 2.
14. Since I will concentrate on the translations of Eco’s own texts and on the translation executed by him, and given limits of space, I will not go into Eco’s discussion of translating poetry.
15. Mouse or Rat? 3.
16. In arguing about these notions, and on topics treated in translation studies in general, Eco shows that he is informed and up to date on the existing literature on the various themes. Although he refers to it, he very seldom goes into a direct discussion or assessment of the content or point of view.
17. Umberto Eco, “Intervento introduttivo,” in L. Aviorovic and T. Dodds, eds., Umberto Eco, Claudio Magris: Autori e traduttori a confronto (Udine: Campanotto Editore, 1993), 19 (my translation).
18. Eco, Mouse or Rat? 117.
19. However, many translators have written about their experience.
20. “Equivalent effect” is a notion present in the work of Eugene Nida and his two types of equivalence: formal and dynamic. Dynamic equivalence is defined as “the principle of equivalent effect” where “the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message.” Eugene Nida, Towards a Science of Translation (Leiden: Brill, 1964), 159.
21. Eco, Mouse or Rat? 56.
22. Ibid., 66.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 67.
25. Eco, Experiences in Translation, 31–32.
26. Ibid., 29.
28. I refer here to concepts that have circulated among translation scholars since the late 1980s, initially launched by authors such as Susan Bassnett in Translation Studies (New York: Routledge, 1991), André Lefevere in Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (New York: Routledge, 1992), and Edwin Gentzler in Contemporary Translation Studies (New York: Routledge, 1993), as well as the polysystem theory represented principally by Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem,” in James S. Holmes, José Lambert, and Raymond van den Broeck, eds., Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies (Leuven: Acco, 1978), and Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1995).
29. Eco, Mouse or Rat? 2.
30. Eco, Experiences in Translation, 39.
31. Eco, Mouse or Rat? 5.
32. Eco, “Intervento introduttivo,” in Aviorovic and Dodds, eds., Umberto Eco, Claudio Magris, 22 (my translation).
33. Umberto Eco, “Introduction,” in Raymond Queneau, Esercizi di stile, trans. Eco (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), 5 (my translation).
34. From a certain point of view, both Queneau’s and Eco’s operations can be considered as intralingual translations; since Eco does not treat this aspect in his writings, we will not deal with it here.
35. See Edwin Gentzler and Maria Tymoczko, “Introduction,” in E. Gentzler and M. Tymoczko, eds., Translation and Power (Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 2002).
36. Eco, Experiences in Translation, 56.
37. Eco, Mouse or Rat? 100–101.
38. In the early 1990s the translation scholar André Lefevere stated, quite provocatively: “On every level of the translation process, it can be shown that, if linguistic considerations enter into conflict with considerations of an ideological and/or poetological nature, the latter tend to win out.” Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, 39.
39. Eco, Mouse or Rat? 75–76.
40. The results of the seminars are included in the thematic issue on intersemiotic translation in the Italian journal of semiotics: “Sulla traduzione intersemiotica,” special issue, ed. Nicola Dusi and Siri Nergaard, Versus, nos. 85–87 (2000).
41. Eco, Mouse or Rat? 2.
42. Although not stated explicitly, it is conceivable that Eco has scholars like Gideon Toury, André Lefevere, and Susan Bassnett in mind, scholars whose works are being introduced in Italy exactly during these years. Proof of Eco’s consciousness of the increasing importance of translation as an academic issue is the series of publications on translation he takes the initiative to start with the Italian publishing house Bompiani at the beginning of the 1990s. Eco seems to be less updated on current trends in translation studies.
43. Eco, The Limits of Interpretation, 5–6. For the original passage, see Eco, I limiti dell’interpretazione (Milan: Bompiani, 1990), 9.
44. Eco, The Limits of Interpretation, 6; I limiti dell’interpretazione, 13.
45. Eco, The Limits of Interpretation, 54; I limiti dell’interpretazione, 27.
46. I refer in particular to the debate and the book that followed the Tanner Lectures that Eco gave in 1990 on the theme “Interpretation and Overinterpretation.” Results of the lectures and debates were published in Umberto Eco with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brooke-Rose, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
47. Eco, Mouse or Rat? 16.
48. Ibid., 2.
49. Ibid., 5.
50. Ibid., 34.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 6.
53. Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in R. Brower, ed., On Translation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
54. Eco, Mouse or Rat? 126.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Eco’s schematic classification of the different types of interpretation was published for the first time in the thematic issue on intersemiotic translation in the journal Versus nos. 85–87 (2000) and is represented in both Experiences in Translation and Dire quasi la stessa cosa, but is excluded from Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation.
58. Eco, Mouse or Rat? 157.
59. Ibid., 125.
60. Paolo Fabbri, “Due parole sul trasporre,” Versus, nos. 85–87 (2000): 271–84, 274.
61. Nicola Dusi, “Introduzione,” Versus, nos. 85–87 (2000): 3–54, 45.
62. Eco, Mouse or Rat? 160–65.
63. Eco, Experiences in Translation, 124.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 126.
66. See Yuri Lotman, Culture and Explosion (New York: De Gruyter Mouton, 2009) and Algirdas J. Greimas and Joseph Courtés, Sémiotique: dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage (Paris: Hachette, 1979).
67. Maria Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (Manchester: St. Jerome, 1999), 282.
68. Eco, Mouse or Rat? 5.